Two host materials based on CPDT as donors in bulk heterojunction organic solar cells were designed and investigated by means of DFT calculations. The first one (P-CPDTBT3) is a copolymer with D-A configuration and the second one (SM-CPDTDPP) is a D-π-A-π-D type small molecule. The investigated materials exhibited interesting structural properties with high planarity and rigidity originated from intra-molecular non-covalent interactions between the different building blocks. Thanks to their narrow band gaps, the optical absorption spectra have covered the main part of solar spectrum of interest. In addition, some general transport properties have been established. The transition density matrix (TDM) was used to get insight into the interaction of hole–electron localization and the electronic excitation processes. The photovoltaic parameters (FF, Voc) were calculated. The obtained results have been attempted to provide novel structure–property relationships for the rational design strategies of high-performance photovoltaic materials with power conversion efficiency of nearly 10%.
Part of the book: Solar Cells
Recently, donor-acceptor type molecule that contains electron-rich (D) and electron-deficient (A) moiety has emerged as an interesting approach of molecular design strategy to develop organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and non-linear optical (NLO) devices. In this work, we report a theoretical investigation based on two donor-acceptor (D-A) type small π-conjugated molecules based on dithieno [3,2-b: 2′,3′-d] pyrrole (DTP) and anthracene derivatives. All of the theoretical calculations were performed by Density Functional Theory (DFT) approach at B3LYP/6-31 g(d) level of theory. The structural, electronic, optical and charge transfer properties were investigated. The effect of acceptor blocks (DPA and DTA) on the molecular characteristics was elucidated. The obtained results clearly show that the studied compounds exhibit non-coplanar structures with low electronic band gap values. These relevant structures exhibited important optical absorption and intense emission in the green-yellow region. NLO investigation based on static polarizability (α0), first-order hyperpolarizability (β0) and second-order hyperpolazabilty (ɣ0) demonstrated that the studied materials exhibit excellent NLO properties. Thus, the designed materials showed promising capabilities to be utilized in OLED and NLO applications.
Part of the book: Density Functional Theory